The Sound Is the Same, but the Music Has Awakened to the World

Ceremony and Sleepies at the Kimmel Center

From left, Anthony Anzaldo, Ross Farrar and Justin Davis of Ceremony performing at the Eisner & Lubin Auditorium at N.Y.U.’s Kimmel Center.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

The perceived narrowness of North American hardcore punk 30 years ago — clomping two-beat rhythm, two-minute songs, interchangeable anti-authority verses yelled by young men — was really only heard from its orthodox wings. (Every movement needs them.) But if you could have seen it all from above, you’d have seen it going all over the place: funk, minimalism, surf, prog, noise, theater, comedy.

Now the world knows of hardcore, and hardcore knows of the world. It has metaconsciousness. And so the wide-ranging four-band hardcore show on Thursday night in the Eisner & Lubin Auditorium of N.Y.U.’s Kimmel Center was only being true to hardcore’s past.

There was hardcore rendered by Sleepies, from Brooklyn, as amiable college-rock; by a band with an unprintable name, from Syracuse, as condensed, noisy self-analysis; by White Lung, from Vancouver, with big-gesture taunts and warnings; and by Ceremony, from San Francisco, as the breadth of hardcore, with changes of form, sound and attitude from song to song. There could have been a show like this 30 years ago, with four bands not too dissimilar from these. But it would have caused some confusion. And it might have been less likely for two women to emerge as the obvious stars.

Photo

The singer Meredith Graves.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

Ceremony’s set had the most depth of character. Its singer, Ross Farrar, can seem a cipher — inward, deadpan, then suddenly enraged. And his resistance to creating his own clichés was echoed by the band’s music: sometimes formulaically fast, sometimes stubbornly mid-tempo or repetitive, and historically literate all the time, whether the obvious punk referent was Manchester in 1979, New York’s Lower East Side in 1982 or the Bay Area in 2005.

White Lung is more focused and stylized, and Mish Way, its singer, more vivid — present in the moment, enjoying all this as rock and theater and feminism as she sang her refrains, with phrasing influenced by Courtney Love, as if half the words should be in italics: “I want away from you!” “What did he say?” “I’ll come back to warn you!” She’s becoming an important part of the story of hardcore’s metaconsciousness, as well as its relationship with the Internet, by writing about punk (and sexuality, and other things) for Vice and Salon and other highly visible websites. The moral and ethical wrestling in those essays, and in all her lyrics, is pure hardcore. But it’s rendered loudly and publicly and with no pretension, instead of for an insider audience.

The Internet has also been central to the quick rise of that band with the unprintable name, led by the singer Meredith Graves, and not just because of what that name, a good gender-studies provocation, turns up online. In less than a year — and with the release of only a four-song cassette, “I Have Lost All Desire for Feeling” — it has become identified as the next crucial punk band to know about, a distinction that Ceremony and White Lung have already passed through.

This is partly because of the band’s basic, propulsive racket, amplified by Shaun Sutkus’s electronic looping effects. But it’s mostly because of Ms. Graves, who on Thursday was almost graceful in her vehemence and organized in her body language, delivering trenchant lyrics rhythmically (“I was understood to be living/I existed only when seen, so I died of self-importance”). She’s no kind of traditional punk singer, and therefore the one to pay attention to. The band’s set lasted 15 minutes, just slightly shorter than a headlining set I heard it play a few months ago. The tape’s fine, but nothing like the gigs.

A version of this review appears in print on December 7, 2013, on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: The Sound Is the Same, but the Music Has Awakened to the World. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe